Seeing red

[bennyboy]

Yeah, not necessarily break but just drastically alter its functioning. I wonder now too if epileptic fits might be that sort of wave effect, and if so it's not a good thing. As for spiritual experiences, have you had any? Or what you'd liken to them? Ie in meditation. I haven't had any experiences that I would deem spiritual so I can't relate to it. But expert practitioners of meditation can 'quiet' the mind and experience all sorts of weird stuff.

Yes, I've had several major events in my life under a variety of conditions: a couple times in meditation, a couple times when fasting and reading the Bible, a couple times under the effects of LSD, at least one time caused by strobing lights, and a couple times while getting deep into philosophy and physics-- especially when i deeply pondered things like QM, entanglement, etc. I've had 3 or 4 real lucid dreams and a cople out of body experiments, as well.

I would call them "spiritual" in the sense that I know they are the kind of experience that spirtual-minded people often talk to. But not in the sense that I believe they are a product of any spiritual activity.

...and that the difference between a human brain and any other mammalian brain is not the number of layers, but the number of columns. So the human brain has drastically more columns than any other animal brain, but the form of those columns is roughly the same in all mammals. So to the question of what would happen if you remove neurons one at a time, I'd say it depends where you remove them from, so if it was removing columns at a time in the cerebral cortex, I think the effect would be to reduce the representational space, and thus the complexity of the associations and the information processing that was possible.

When you talk about representation "space," I believe you mean simply capacity, and are not making references to qualia, to homunculi, to stages or screens or anything like that, right?

It's fascinating and I really want to start understanding this structure intimately. The question is, am I willing to spend 75 quid on a book called Cerebral Cortex: Architecture, Connections, and the Dual Origin Concept? It's so tempting because my problem at the moment is I understand the principles and network dynamics of a generic network of that type and arrangement but I don't know much about the structure of specific brain areas. Maybe it's about time I did?  

I don't think you need to spend money every time you want to learn. Googling "cerebral architecture" yielded what seem to be plenty of interesting results.