Our bad

[novapsyche]

Your Mistake, My Mistake--All the Same to the Brain

Why is it so annoying to watch someone else make a mistake? Maybe because it affects the same areas of the brain as when a person makes his or her own mistake, Dutch researchers said on Monday.

Experiments in which volunteers tried a computer task and then watched each other do the same thing showed the brain reacted in a similar way whether the observer made the mistake, or watched someone else make it.

Writing in the May issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, the team at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands said their findings help shed light on how human beings learn by watching one another.

For their experiment Hein van Schie and colleagues hooked up 16 men and women to electrodes to measure brain activity and then sat them in front of a display screen with a joystick. The task was simple -- to move the joystick in the same direction as certain arrows appearing on the screen.

"Participants were instructed to respond both quickly and accurately in the direction of the center arrowhead," Van Schie and colleagues wrote.

After each trial, the volunteers were told whether they were correct.

When people realized they had made an error, a distinctive electrical signal arose from a brain region called the anterior cingulate cortex.

The same thing happened when the volunteers watched other volunteers try the experiment and make the occasional mistake, the researchers found.

"These data suggest that similar neural mechanisms are involved in monitoring one's own actions and the actions of others," they concluded.

Comments

[liquidgrey.livejournal.com]

I find that data to be colinear with the thought that contentment arises from not being in conflict (disharmony) with our environment (people included); one must forgive others completely if one is to be able to forgive oneself.
"Judge not others, lest ye be judged"
the habit of judging (i.e. perceiving error/subjective wrong-doing in the acts of other people) is inevitably applied to the self as well, since the self is just another person in the field of awareness (though the ego arising out of this field likes to think of itself as separate, the real "I").
It's old wisdom.
Nice of science to justify it for the materialist in us all.

[artofcode.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Think I actually got that one.

[mrgodot.livejournal.com]

In danger of exposing ignorance, I don't really understand what the use of studies which show brain activity after certain actions are performed. I mean obviously there's going to be brain activity registered. Studies aren't going to be published which said Joe saw Jane fall and there was no brain activity otherwise Joe would be brain dead. I mean the brain is small but there's so many different experiences we have so I don't know whether you can say for sure that brain activity in certain regions (even if say there are the same region) mean something because maybe that region does more than one thing. I don't know because I don't follow all this research but I took one cognitive science class and I didn't get it.

[novapsyche.livejournal.com]

It still amazes me that chemical-electrical signals darting back and forth inside flesh make up who we are (our sense of "I"). For me, understanding which parts of our brains correspond to our (re)actions helps me to understand humanity at a very basic level.

It fascinates me that time is really measured by the temporal lobes. What if we didn't have the sense of time? What kind of people would we be?

Brain chemistry is such a delicate balance. So many pathways and organs within itself. The brain is such a specialized structure. I'm floored to examine such intricacy from "the outside" as it were--from consciousness looking at the organ that houses it. How did nature do it? How is it that we ended up with this prize?

[mrgodot.livejournal.com]

I would disagree that chemical-electrical signals make up our sense of self. I would argue that consciousness is based on the synergy of all this activity and that this added value cannot be computed through observation of individual signals.

"What if we didn't have the sense of time? What kind of people would we be?"

Well humans can't see xrays but xrays still exist. Let's say we could perceive time we'd still see the sun rising and setting and probably make some assumptions that theoretically time exists. The concept would still be there. People who are color blind see the world in black and white and the experience they have is different than a color seeing person but I think the inability to perceive time would be something evolution has weeded out of its system. Maybe at the beginning of time, if such a thing could be, there were creatures that existed seeing xrays but not perceiving time. Something to ponder. Our abilities are not the end all of possible experience.

I know this is a difficult position but maybe consciousness is housed in the entire body. Maybe the heart and lungs have some role in the human consciousness. Maybe the brain is not the throne of the self. Maybe everything that goes into our digestion affects our consciousness. I know people hold that belief without even realizing. Many religions definately do. Like Hindu belief in chakras.

[novapsyche.livejournal.com]

That's not a difficult position at all. In fact, it reminds me of my old idea of the "bodymind".

My use of psychoactive substances has certainly spurred me onto wanting to understand how they operate on that which is "me". How can a chemical alter how I relate to myself, and which parts of the brain (and other parts of the body) are involved then?

The brain is a special warehouse. I can't convince this of you. But as the processing center, it holds quite an important function.

ps

[mrgodot.livejournal.com]

Oh and I remember on the first day of the cognitive science class I was so excited about learning about the brain that I thought to myself maybe this could be a major for me. But a few weeks into the class I lost my interest and, to quote my running gag at the time, forgot to attend all the classes on memory.