What happens in your brain when you think?

[Hdier]

I have asked many people this, and no one could tell me. I asked my science teacher, but he only said, and I (probably mis)quote "In three minutes?"

So, can anyone tell me...

What happens in your brain when you think?

[qwerty]

That is uncertain... I don't think there is a really good brain theory that can tell you how your mind works when you think. Different parts of it will activate for different tasks - so music will use most of the brain but no-one knows how.

If you want to know more then I would suggest perhaps looking into Neuron Scattering (I don't know if this is exactly related, but if may give you some sort of idea as to how complex the nerves in the brain are).

[helices]

An excellent analogy of the way a mind works can be found by considering an insect colony.

Let's take ants, for example. Each ant is pretty basic, it just responds to stimuli around it in a very rigid, predictible way. It knows no more about how to build a working ant colony than it does about philosophy. It doesn't know anything about conrolling the different classes of ants in the colony, or about managment of food resources etc etc. Yet when all the ants get together and reach a critical mass, their countless interactions produce a functioning colony, even though none of the ants controls it or knows what's going on beyond itself.

Similarly, neurons are not too complex when considered on their own, and no single neuron can be said to contain any knowledge. Yet when there are enough of them, their countless interactions give rise to something amazing beyond themselves - self awareness and thought.

Of course this probably will not satisfy your question but it is an interesting start.

I should mention that I think I read this in a book called "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas R. Hofstader. In the book he gives some attention to (amongst other things) how neurons give rise to self-awareness, and I highly recommend it if you're interested in finding out more.

[Hdier]

Yes, it is a very interesting start. However, do you (or anyone else) know how I think words? Are they simply just manifestations of thought? If so, how do they manifest themselves as words and what are thoughts?

[Drayakir]

Yeah, basically think of your brain as a conglomeration of lots of circuit switches, with each switch being simultaneously linked to a crapload of other switches. Then, an electro-chemical impulse will travel along a chain, re-routing itself based on which switches are in the "on" or "off" position.

[Hdier]

Do electrical switches create words inside of them whenever they are being used? No. How do words manifest themselves inside my head?


BTW, thank you for your contribution.

[qwerty]

See that's exactly it... How do you create words from electrical systems?
How does a computer display information based on electrical circuitry and 1 & 0's...

The only place I recommend now is looking at a Turing Machine, though I'm pretty sure it wasn't modeled off neurology.

[ScottH]

Great questions, but true understanding of this (to the extent at least that modern science understands it) is far, far beyond what someone can explain in a forum.

Science has, naturally, been pursuing the same questions for a long while. Neuro-science progresses a bit each year, and often there are great leaps in understanding, or at least great leaps in recognizing more stuff that isn't well understood.

Neuro-networking (as a science, it's related mathematics, and computer science) is an attempt to understand and simulate the way brains work. Each year there seems to be a "de-facto model" that everybody uses, but then each year some new revelations changes everything. Once, it was believed that neurons were simple potential-accumulators, gathering energy from nearby neurons firing until they themselves release their energy and fire.

Then one day, someone discovered that some neurons, under certain circumstances, will begin firing at regular intervals (10, 20, maybe 40 times a second), and the result can be that they stimulate nearby neurons to fire more often, or even inhibit nearby neurons from firing at all.

The complexity is astounding, but the study is fascinating.

I don't know what your background is and exactly what your needs are, but I recommend "The Emperor's New Mind" as a great book on the subject. It's really a trip through science history related to the brain and computers, including previous theories that modeled human brains as no more than super complex Turing machines, up to present (well, present when the book was written). The author builds a magnificent case, then presents a hypothesis that perhaps brains are quantum machines, for he has good evidence that our models of merely "biophysical" brains cannot do the things we know brains can do.

Just my two cents.

[Hdier]

qwerty:
I'm not totally sure if you were asking this, but I'll answer it just in case. The way that computers make words appear is that they don't look at it as letters, simply rows of pixels, and which ones are supposed to light up in which colors. Obviously, our brain doesn't work this way.

Thanks for the book references! I'll look them up!

[ankeshkothari]

You need to listen to:
To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

Its worth $10 plus s&h but should answer a lot of your questions.

Basically, each of the smallest of thought particles have a different sense attached to it. They come together in the parietal lobe to become multi-sensory "mental images".

[Hdier]

Hummmm, thanks for pointing that out to me.

I can't buy it now (christmas, then my birthday twelve days after), but I probably will order it on the 6th.

[BadMojo]

Well, a study of rat brains shows that it is the connections between your braincells that controls our thinking and so on.
The braincells uses these connections to send electrical impulses thereby controlling your actions or thoughts.
Some parts of our brain is more active/developed then other parts; thereby making us more intelligent in some areas. (see link (To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.))

So when you think, the brain sends it's electrical impulses through the cognitive patterns (Connections between braincells) thus resulting in whatever answer your brain gives based on what you've learned.

For instance. If you are given your favourite dish while you're hungry. The brain is given the message "Dinner time!". The reaction is often that your mouth waters to help you swallow the food.

Or when you look at a face. Your brain analyse that face to see if goes down a familiar pattern. It does, and it sends back who it is.