Presented at Tucson, Arizona 2002
-with special reference to fractal, neuromental thinking
by Matti Bergström and Pia Ikonen, University Helsinki, Finland
The content of this poster is the result of nearly 40 years research work of our staff at the Department of Physiology, Helsinki University. The aim has been search for how the brain works as whole, as a system and how the concept of Consciousness relates to this whole. This is the reason why we concentrated on the development of the brain, the phylogenetic as well as the ontogenetic, the idea being the well-known rule, that what has been in the brain from the very beginning, is still there at the mature stage. With this in mind we made research on primitive species, such as Coelenteran's, as well as on human embryo, in order to know how the developmentally very first neural nets are working in out brain. This work was continued with higher animals, human fetuses, young animals, children and adult men. The work consisted of function of neural units, sensory an motor systems, integrated systems of brain as well as behavioural functions in animals and children. Nearly 200 publications were produced on this matter. In parallel work was done at a theoretical level in order to construct models of the rain system (see poster), which would fit with the empirical findings. All the time our target was how to combine phenomenological functions with physiological processes, that is, how consciousness performs this combination: the fact being that our conscious mind containes these both without any difficulty!
The first brain system model of ours was what we called an entropy dipole model, a thermodynamical model based on above mentioned studies on the development of animal and human brain. This was then elaborated further to chaos-order dipole model, where the brain's libmic mental self-formed the interaction area between chaotic signal streams from brain stem and ordered stream from cortex. We could now make use of an early finding of us (the significance of which we did not understand at that time) on sensory, psychophysical mapping of mental experience, with imaginary and real number quantities. Application of this finding led us to consider the limbic mental Self being a fractal complex number space of Mandelbrot type (see J. Seppänen 2001), where the imaginary dimension (i) represented primitive brain stem networks and the real dimension (r) the highly developed cortical networks. We then added to this mental space a third dimension of "possibilities" (p), by virtue of the fact that the complex number mathematics applying to the (i,r)-space allows a total freedom to choose its rules, seen in children's creative fantasy. We then tested if the dynamics of processes in this meanl (p, i, r)-space of Self was conforming with the mental dynamics in human subjects. Here we made use of Popper's theory of argumentation as the higest mode of language (thinking) in human. We let the subject get a proposition (statement) and give an immediate answer to this proposition. The idea was that the proposition takes a constant position in the limbi mental space, until this Self handles the situation with its thinking, with the help of its subconscious (i) and conscious (r) resources of the brain. This thinking process could be calculated.
In order to calculate the thought process of the subject to be tested, we considered the limbic system being a Mandelbrot landscape in which a "Stranger", the proposition, is intruding, and against which "intruder" the subject has to protect itself. For this the subject's self has to use all resources available, i.e. the conscious logical knowledge (r), the subconscious values to which it believes (i) and the possibilities of free thinking (p), fantasy. The situation is a Darwinistic one, the SElf either accepting or discarding the intruder. So the thought process could be treated as a complex number mathematical problem applying to Mandelbrot sets (see poster"). In this manner 84 subjects were tested as to their type of thinking. Heavy oscillations between pure types of thinking, combined with stress symptoms, pointed to the possibility that thinking in practical work did not fit with the genetically inherited type of thinking. In stuch cases a kind of "typotherapy" was helpful (see poster"). The diadnosis of the type of thinking was also helpful in solving conflicts between individuals, where there was a difference of type (e.g. between men and women). Since the (pir)-space containes the dimension of subconscious effects, these can be brought to conscious knowledge, which is of help e.g. in decision making.
All this, when applied to our dipole models, points to hte view, that brain is CON-SCI-dipole, CON referring to the primitive, embryonal, pregravitatory pole and SCI to the developed, cortical, gravitatory pole. The Self, mediating between these two, thus exhibits a state of CON-SCI-OUSNESS. In order to investigate consciousness we therefore have to change our SCI-ENCE to an integrated CON-SCIENCE!
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