Seeing red

[emjay]

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.

The only one of those I can relate to are lucid dreams, because I've had plenty of those, but not for a long time, much to my annoyance because they were some of the best experiences of my life And with meditation I get into it... I see the benefit and don't want it to end no matter how bored I may feel at times... just letting that boredom drift through... so I can do it for about an hour and be glad I did, but I haven't experienced anything 'transcendental' with it... though the sense of the passage of time is pretty cool... aware of every little noise and how it passes and is forgotten. Stuff like that.

Anyway wow... I'd love to be in your head I can't imagine having a 'spiritual' experience just from thinking about philosophy... all it does for me is give me a headache I guess you get really into it in a zoned out kinda way? And the most I've ever had drugs-wise is a bit of weed... which admittedly did have some cool effects, like hyper-awareness... similar to the meditation... and something that I can only liken to goldfish memory... walking home from the pub and forgetting where I'd come from every few steps. So what's an LSD trip like? And the out of body experience? Is that the same thing as 'dissociation'... as apparently occurs in extreme pain etc... do you really see yourself from a different perspective? As if your eyes are no longer in your head and you can actually see yourself head on?

...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?

No, just capacity... but in a kind of exponential way. So not capacity in the sense of a few more megabytes of RAM in a computer, but in a combinational sense. In the sense that presumably each representation can be associated with any other.

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.

That's my problem really... I'm a sucker for books... I like them because they're solid, reliable, and don't change. A previous employer told me 'Google is your friend' and that, especially in the computing world, I shouldn't rely on books too much because technology moves so fast they quickly get out of date. But it never really sunk in and given the choice I'd always prefer a book. That said, I did Google cerebral columns earlier and did find some interesting pages, so I do see the value. It's just I like books more.