How smart are you?
Let’s analyze the mind from the point of view of neuroscience, determine who is a genius and who is stupid, and answer acute social questions.
Difficulty: 🧠 🧠 .
Links to the sources used for the article will be at the end!
Your mind — what is it?
Most often, the question is, how do you imagine your mind, physically or somehow virtually? I get exactly the second option of the answer and you know, I’m very sad to hear something like this. Because the meaning of what I study (human behavior, brain function), the very essence of neuroscience is that our consciousness can exist only if it is something physical. Obviously, the correct answer is the first one.
What can you prove?
I will give just a couple of examples, but this will be enough.
Lobotomy. Open-brain surgery, where the prefrontal cortex of the brain is involved. Due to changes in it, a person can completely change in the range of processes regulated by it. In the course of the article, we will touch on this topic, because it is too important in a person’s life and sometimes people were even killed because of problems with it.
Electroencephalography. Registration of the work of the brain. The analyzed data can be used in different ways. Identify brain diseases or, for example, determine your mood.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation. This is probably the most interesting thing from this list. Its principle is the effect on the brain with the muffling or vice versa activation of any parts of the brain. For a short time, you can take away your free will (it turns out that you do not have free will) or make a sociopath. The availability of such opportunities is very pleasing.
What is my mind made of?
We have decided that the mind, consciousness, is something physical, then the next question is. What is my mind made of?
In general, your consciousness is enclosed in the brain, but not every part of it is equal to another.
We have 1 brain, but at the same time 2 hemispheres — 2 different thinking organisms that are responsible for personal tasks and work together. The left one is responsible for the ability to speak, analyze, detail, abstract, and most often the right leading hand, and the right one is responsible for the perception of information as a whole, working through many channels at once, in conditions of lack of information, restoring the whole in its parts and most often the left leading hand. We have 1 brain and the prefrontal cortex, the limbic system and everything else that we are not interested in right now. The first is responsible for your thoughts and actions, more often they focus on social behavior, the second is responsible for vegetative functions, your ability to control your body. The cerebellum, as important a part of the brain as any, is responsible for autonomic functions.
There are still many important parts of the brain.
All these systems work on the basis of neurons, you have about 80–100 billion of them and synapses (connections of neurons), there are about 2 quadrn of them. As you might have guessed, not all neurons are equivalent to each other, some are responsible for your behavior, and others for the opportunity to show it.
The brain has more tasks than these 2.
Thus, we cannot linearly add up the “price” of neurons and determine the level of intelligence, because the set of neurons from the prefrontal cortex is not equal to the set from the limbic system.
In fact, neurons hold the same amount of information, but they have different tasks, so we cannot equate them socially.
It is also worth recalling the concept of neuroplasticity of the brain and the fact that neurons are constantly dying and new ones appear.
You understood correctly if you concluded that our mind is a collection of neurons and synapses divided into groups and departments in our brain.
But this is not the whole part of the reasons for your behavior. Also, you can’t just close your eyes to your genes, the genome. Oddly enough, but you can not ignore even the hormones that are temporarily released into the blood, a large number of them intercepts part of your behavior.
Social Q&A
(I’m Russian and yes, these are our current problems)
Q: Who can I call you stupid?
A: Only the person with real problems with the brain (the degree depends on the area of the brain) or genes (less important); also any child, in children the brain is in an active stage of development, so not yet at the peak of their powers; of course older people who have already begun the aging of the brain.
Q: The child hit someone, what to do?
A: In children, part of the thought process is occupied by hormones — > emotions and this part dominates until enough neurons and synapses have developed. The brain forms an emotional factor in the course of education. In our reality, the simplest negative example is an insult. Therefore, the child cannot fully control his behavior if such a factor has worked.
In no case should you scold a child for this (he will never be able to understand his actions without emotions, but with emotions), it is better to explain to him that insults should be treated differently. If this is not true, then we do not react, if it is true and we are interested in it, then I hope the offender will help us solve it, if it is true, but we are not interested, then we do not care again.
In this way, we will also preserve his mental state (in this context, a social term) and will be able to avoid subsequent conflict situations where he could damage his mental health even more.
Q: My child complains about social problems, but I don’t take it seriously, or my child is withdrawn and I don’t know if he has social problems. What should I do?
A: I think it is no longer necessary to explain that this is simply unacceptable arrogance on your part. You must provide a favorable environment for the development of a person who does not have deviant and antisocial behavior from birth.
Q: Why is my child being bullied?
A: Deviant behavior is caused by problems with the prefrontal cortex of the brain. In a child, it is simply not developed or developed, but not completely. Also, hormones that affect behavior worsen the situation.
The best option is if the child becomes socially active in this local group, because most likely he is isolated.
Excerpts of a social nature are not scientifically proven, and if they are proven, then this is not considered here!
Conclusion
The mind is a non-permanent collection of neurons and synapses, genes, hormones with a general analysis of a person since prenatal development and complete atomic reductionism.
Now we do not have the opportunity to analyze these factors and it is not always worth considering only them, sometimes we need to resort to reductionism and/or go back to the past up to prenatal development.
Sources (38)
(sorry if you will find some mistakes with sources, bs of for my articles on russian I’m using russian resources)
Mind, mind (2), brain, brain (3), Limbic system, limbic system (2), Prefrontal cortex, prefrontal cortex (2), neuron, neuron (2), synapse, synapse (2), gene, gene (2), genome, Brain, Cerebellum, Cerebellum (2), Prenatal development, Transcranial magnetic stimulation, transcranial magnetic stimulation in practice, electroencephalography, electroencephalography in practice, problems with the prefrontal cortex as reasons to go to prison, lobotomy, electroencephalography (2), lobotomy in practice, synapses in the brain, brain hemispheres, brain hemispheres (2), hormones affect behavior, brain neuroplasticity, reductionism, sociopathy, deviant behavior, brain aging, brain aging (2).
